I’m really liking the new Preview option on Google Mobile Search, and I reckon it will be used far more than preview in regular web search. But there’s a small problem. Well actually a couple of problems, but here’s the solution to one:

The above wont run showCntent() to Google’s PreviewBot. Why might you want to do this? Well I like to run surveys on some sites to gather qualitative feedback. I tend to use 4QSurvey.com for this (free, easy to set up, and gives great insight). The last thing you want is PreviewBot showing your website with the lightbox questionnaire, so it’s easy to block out. This is the code I use to load 4QSurvey asynchornously:

The above will not block loading, and ensure PreviewBot doesn’t show a site preview with pop-up. To learn more about PreviewBot see Google’s Web Preview docs. The UA used for PreviewBot is “Google Web Preview (Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13)”.

Well Richard, long time no hear, the preview is not something i would of even thought of re google previewing a script etc, what about making the preview show what you want? What do you make of big Gs current so called shake up aimed at content farms and the like, i always assummed that the search algo had some type of content quality weighting, yet it seems that the borderline gibberish that is the world of auto content is effecting the results.

Missing the regular updates, but a great post as always. I’m going to look into the previews on my sites and check they are showing correctly. This is going to be really important for getting the best click through rates.

This is the exact code I was looking for! I’ve discovered that when you work in web design you have to run a lot of reports, and making sure that they don’t interfere with Google’s preview results is absolutely key.